Dear friends

A VISITOR

Newspaperman
Bob Wick stopped in at High Country
News recently. Wick, who lives in Sierra Vista, Ariz.,
and his brother co-own almost 40 small newspapers across the
country, including the nearby Montrose Daily
Press. Wick is an environmentalist as well as a
publisher, but what seems to consume him most is sculpture: He
makes monumental bronze works that house live native plants and
echo the landscape around them. Wick told us his inspiration nearly
always "comes out of the great, majestic natural creations of the
West."

CONGRATULATIONS

Congratulations to Editor Paul Koberstein and
the rest of the crew at Cascadia Times, who just
landed the 2004 John B. Oakes Award for the nation’s best
environmental journalism. Cascadia, on the Web
at www.times.org, comes out only occasionally, when its shoestring
budget allows. The award was for the fall 2003 issue headlined
"Plundering the Pacific," about how the federally appointed
committees that oversee U.S. fisheries are rife with conflicts of
interest, and are actually damaging the seas they are supposed to
protect. Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism, who presented the award, called the
story "an example of how a small, underfunded, independent
publication can make a difference."

HCN Contributing Editor Michelle
Nijhuis received some recognition for her July 19, 2004,
cover story about bark beetles, "They’re here: Global
Warming’s Unlikely Harbingers." The National Association of
Science Writers and the National Press Foundation gave her an
honorable mention for the 2004 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for
young science journalists. They praised Michelle for, among other
things, her "ability to make beetles and climate forecasts
interesting and scary, without sensationalizing the topic."

Kudos to former HCN intern and current
Douglas County News Press reporter Alex
Pasquariello, who garnered two awards from the Colorado
Press Association in February. A story about Colorado’s
"First Bite" law, which allows dog-bite victims to file civil
lawsuits, won him third place in the "Best News Story" category for
weekly newspapers with more than 4,000 readers. He also won second
place in the "Best Agricultural Story" category for a profile of
three teenagers who raise prize-winning steers. "I woke up at 4:30
a.m. to get to these kids’ ranch in time to see them do their
morning chores with the animals," writes Alex. "Quite a feat given
my penchant for REM sleep in the morning."

The Wirth
Chair at the University of Colorado, Denver, will present former
HCN publisher Ed Marston with
its "distinguished service" award in April. The university’s
Tom McCoy says the award isn’t just for
the 20 years Ed put in at HCN, "but for his
commitment to the West and to Colorado, for his many written works,
and for the fact that he is still thinking and talking about issues
that are fundamental to our shared existence."

And
finally, this from writer John McPhee, regarding
Betsy Marston’s column, which appears on the back page of
each issue of HCN, and in papers around the
region: "Please tell Betsy that ‘Heard Around the West’
is one of my favorite things."

CORRECTION

In our Feb. 7 "follow-up" column,
we made two goofs in a blurb about the beleaguered — if not
quite endangered — desert tortoise. The tortoise is listed as
"threatened," not endangered, and it is the Bureau of Land
Management’s job to plan for the protection and recovery of
the species, not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s.